


New Year's Eve

by indigoat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Late Night Conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 16:10:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11421495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigoat/pseuds/indigoat
Summary: Something I wrote to answer my own question of why Scully still follows him (it's not because he stole her car keys). Post How The Ghosts Stole Christmas.





	New Year's Eve

Mulder was lying on his couch, with the TV playing some old cowboy movie in front of him. His digital watch, glowing in the dark, read 11:24. 

 

He stretched his arm out, resting it under his head, and shifted trying to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. Ever since he and Scully has visited that haunted house in Maryland sleep refused to come easy, his thoughts keeping him up late into the night.

 

The old man had told Mulder that he chased aliens and spirits in the hope that catching them would fill the emptiness inside him. Why else would he be spending his Christmas Eve in a dusty old mansion? It wasn't like anyone wanted him around, like he had any plans with family or friends. It was as if finding the truth would somehow stop the loneliness slowly carving him up. 

 

The movie on the TV ended in a loud commotion of triumphant horns as the hero rode a horse across an empty field and disappeared on the horizon. Mulder reached for the remote and switched channels, he caught a glimpse of a crowd of people standing outside and quickly clicked back. The announcer's voice was excited, and as the camera panned upwards Mulder realised what day it was. Sure enough, there was the big glittery ball suspended at the top of a tall building. New year's Eve.

 

At first he thought he was imagining the knocking on his door, but when it became slightly louder and more impatient he pushed himself into standing position and made his way carefully through his dark apartment, his heart suddenly lighter. He only knew one person that knocked like that.

 

"Hey," Scully said, like it was perfectly normal for her to be at his doorstep at half past eleven at night. Mulder stepped aside, his hand finding the small of her back as she walked inside.

 

"What're you doing here so late?"

 

"I was at a party," Scully said, slipping her coat off and laying it over the top of a chair. "But I… just wanted to leave, I guess." She followed him into the next room and sat down next to him on the couch. The fact that she knew his apartment by heart even in the dark made Mulder smile, and he was glad the lights were all out. He muted the television and turned to face her, her silhouette visible from the pale fish tank lights and the lights coming in through the window.

 

"What's up?"

 

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "I just can't stop thinking about that, uh… that house we visited."

 

"You either, huh?"

 

"Mulder, you know I don't go with you just to prove you wrong, right? I know you said I never have--"

 

"I was joking," he said quickly. Self-righteous and narcissistic was right.

 

"I know, I know. But it just didn't sit well with me. I don't think I'm such a petty person that I get all my joy from knocking down your conspiracies"

 

Mulder didn't say anything, he sensed more coming.

 

Scully drew in a breath. "And I didn't like thinking that I'm just being dragged around by you, like there are other places I'd rather be and I'm just being pliant, driving out to meet you God-knows-where to hunt for spirits."

 

"I didn't think you were," he said quickly. It was important to him that she knew that, that she didn't think he thought she was only there because she didn't know how to say no. Her independence was important to her, and Scully knowing he respected her was important to him. 

 

"The truth is, Mulder," she continued, and he knew by the tone of her voice that she used that word purposely, "I'm out there with you because I want to be. I may not believe everything you propose to me, or most of it, in fact, but I like to use what I know and apply it to what we see. I like to see how the things I know help me understand what I don't, or see how what I know from the… the practical world, I guess, fits into the… the…"

 

"The sci-fi world?" Mulder asked, grinning. Scully's silhouette nodded in the dark.  
"And what I know helps me make sense of that world, yes. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to start agreeing with you on everything--"

 

"That'd be pretty boring."

 

"Exactly. And frankly I don't think you're right about everything. But if what I see out there is real, it's not a contradiction to nature. It's a contradiction to what we know about nature. Any scientist knows that science is simply the art of proving others wrong, building off theories that work and replacing ones that don’t. So that's why I go with you. I want to be out there. And I want to be out there with you."

 

She said it so simply, so matter of factly, that Mulder could almost imagine her I love you's being the same way--no-nonsense, looking at him as if he were foolish to suggest anything different. Of course the sky is blue, Mulder. Of course I love you. Thinking anything else would be ridiculous. 

 

Anything else would be ridiculous, he thought. She came to his apartment on New Year's Eve to tell him she wanted to be out with him. Not alien hunting, not ghost busting, but truth seeking. With him. She chose him. She always had been, ever since that first day she came down to his basement office. He suddenly realised he'd never been lonely on a case since then, not because he was looking for monsters and myths and finding them but because she'd been looking with him, occasionally (okay, most of the time) shaking her head and rolling her eyes, but with him just the same. She spent Christmas Eve with him. She shared cars with him. She braved second-rate motels with him. And yet he still wanted to roam.

 

"Scully?"

 

"Mhm?"

 

"The old guy told me I was only chasing down aliens because I thought finding them would fill up this empty part of me, this loneliness. But he was wrong."

 

"How so?"

 

"I still want to go out and find the truth and see crazy things, but I'm not lonely. I have been for a long time, but that was because I wasn't opening my eyes to the truth. I am now."

 

"And what is the truth?"

 

He turned to face her. Sitting beside her was so familiar, they shared couches across from witnesses and suspects and law enforcement, chairs in the Assistant Director's office, floors as they leaned against walls, tired seeping into their bones. He knew the way she moved better than he knew himself, had all her mannerisms and quircks catalogued like an X-file. 

 

He looked down at his watch, still glowing in the dark. 11:59.

 

Even in the dark they moved together seamlessly, eyes shut and lips parted and hands reaching. Kissing her felt like, finally, like something had clicked into place, like the universe could keep moving now, like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces together at last. He pulled away and he could just barely see her smile, in the dim light from outside. Then she was wrapping her arms around him, pulling him closer, bringing her face close to his as the watch around his wrist flickered to 12:00.

 

She said it just like he'd imagined, like her love for him was an indisputable fact. And when he said it back, it was like he'd never known loneliness when he was by her side.


End file.
